Plans for a Walmart Supercenter at the site of the former Gentilly Woods shopping center won approval Thursday from the New Orleans City Council. The 118,000-square-foot store is expected to open by mid-2014. The site has the municipal address of 4301 Chef Menteur Highway, but the store will face Press Drive from behind a 650-foot-deep parking lot. The 12.2-acre site has sat unused since Hurricane Katrina.

"We have been waiting anxiously for this for three years," said Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, whose district includes the site. "We can't wait for cranes in the sky." "We need more," Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson told Walmart representatives. "Keep going."

In what has become standard procedure when proposals for big-box stores are under consideration, the council voted to give the store about 100 more parking spaces than are authorized under city regulations for such stores.

The abandoned Gentilly Woods shopping center was photographed in November 2008.Eliot Kamenitz, The Times-Picayune archive

Based on the size of the store, the Walmart would be allowed a maximum of 385 parking spaces under the big-box-store regulations. The developers said they need at least 481 spaces. That is about 100 fewer than Walmart normally wants for a store of this size, but chain officials said they would accept the smaller number because some customers are expected to take public transit, walk or ride bikes to the urban site.

Overriding its staff's advice, the City Planning Commission last month agreed to the 481 spaces and to other waivers sought by Walmart, including on the size and number of attached and detached signs. The commission also rejected its staff's advice to require a second pedestrian walkway through the parking lot. The staff said the second aisle would make crossing the lot safer and more inviting for people on foot. Walmart said it is not needed.

The council voted 7-0 Thursday to approve all the same waivers endorsed earlier by the commission.

The council voted in November to let a planned Walmart store at Interstate 10 and Bullard Avenue in eastern New Orleans have the 727 parking spaces developers were seeking, 101 more than the planning staff recommended. That 187,500-square-foot store is expected to open a few months before the Gentilly Woods store.

The city's planners generally argue that big-box stores don't need as many parking spaces in New Orleans as in typical suburban locations because many customers use public transportation and the parking lots therefore sit vacant much of the year. Store executives, on the other hand, want to have enough spaces to accommodate all potential customers during peak shopping periods.

The council last year agreed to let a 148,000-square-foot Costco warehouse store in the Carrollton area have 670 parking spaces, far above the 499 spaces recommended by the commission.